Tuesday 17 April 2012 19.01 EDT
First published on Tuesday 17 April 2012 19.01 EDT

The name of Barack Obama, the father of the American president, is on a list of names revealed in a hitherto secret British colonial file of Kenyans studying in the US.

The file notes that the US state department had told British officials in 1959 that they were concerned Kenyan students in America had a reputation for "falling into the wrong hands".

US officials complained that Kenyan students were becoming "anti-American and anti-white" just at the time Barack Obama Senior was given a grant to study in America.

British colonial administrators in Nairobi expressed concern about the calibre of Kenyans receiving scholarships to go to US universities, claiming they were "academically inferior" to their contemporaries who stayed in Africa to study. They criticised a US-based body, the African American Students Foundation, which gave Obama Senior grants to study business administration at the University of Hawaii, Honululu. Supporters of the project included the singer Harry Belafonte, the actor Sidney Poitier, and the baseball player Jackie Robinson.

The president's father is listed as "OBAMA, Barrack H" in the file of Kenyan students in the US drawn up by British colonial officials.

A year later, in 1960, Obama Senior met a white American called Ann Dunham on a Russian language course at the university. They married the next year and had a son, elected the first black US president in 2008.

Obama Senior died in car crash in Nairobi in 1982. His father, the president's grandfather, Onyango, was jailed by the British for six months in 1949 for his involvement in the Kenyan independence movement. Obama Senior's stepmother, Sarah Onyango Obama, has said he was subjected to beatings and abuse which caused permanent physical disabilities, and a hatred of the British.

• This article was amended on 18 April 2012. The original headline and text highlighted the fact that President Obama's father's name topped the list of Kenyan students in the US. To clarify: he topped the list because it was in alphabetical order.